World Politics Review | Accountability for Mexico’s Ayotzinapa Massacre Won’t Come Easy

On Aug. 18, nearly eight years after 43 students from a teacher’s college in the rural town of Ayotzinapa disappeared, a truth commission set up by the government of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador released a sprawling report that confirmed what many had long argued: The state was involved. The report is a step forward for victims’ families and others who had pushed to keep the case alive, despite efforts to bury it by the administration of former President Enrique Pena Nieto. But whether it will result in accountability remains to be seen.

The case dates back to September 2014, when the group went missing in the southern state of Guerrero. In the months that followed, Jesus Murillo Karam, the attorney general at the time, delivered the official version of events, dubbed the “historic truth”: The 43 students commandeered buses to attend a protest when local police detained them and turned them over to members of the Guerreros Unidos criminal group. The gang supposedly mistook them for rivals, killed them and incinerated their bodies in a garbage dump before tossing their remains into a river. Arrests were made. Case closed.

Except it wasn’t. Instead, Ayotzinapa—as it is known—became an open wound for Mexico and a turning point in what ended up being the scandal-ridden presidency of Pena Nieto. Independent investigators and journalists poked holes in the official version and uncovered the military’s involvement in surveillance and alterations made at the scene of the crime. Detained gang members and police officers were released due to mishandled evidence or signs of torture. Forensic evidence indicated that all the victims could not have been cremated together in the dump. Throughout it all, the students’ family members demanded to know what happened to their loved ones as protesters regularly organized under the rallying cry: “The state did it.”

Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO, pledged to resolve the case and created a truth commission to that end within days of taking office in December 2018. The report it released last month, based on thousands of documents and audio recordings analyzed over the course of its 675-day investigation, confirmed that the victims’ families were right to doubt the initial version.

Alejandro Encinas, the top official in charge of the commission, said the students were likely in the wrong place at the wrong time and mistakenly took a bus transporting drugs or gang money. As authorities worked with drug gangs to disappear the students, the military knew what was going on but did not come to the victims’ aid, even though one of their own, an army spy, had infiltrated the group and was among the 43. Then the military and federal officials covered up the crime.

For many, the state’s involvement wasn’t much of a revelation, but the fact that the report openly admitted to it—as well as to the nexus between organized crime groups and authorities at various levels—was a breakthrough. The next surprise came a day after the report’s release, when the attorney general’s office issued an arrest warrant for Murillo Karam for obstruction of justice, torture and forced disappearance. Another 83 warrants were issued for the soldiers, officials and police officers implicated in the disappearances.

Still, despite the warrants and the truth commission’s report, Mexico cannot simply turn the page on Ayotzinapa, for several reasons.

First, there’s the matter of whether justice will be served. As an architect and defender of the “historic truth,” Murillo Karam infamously ended a November 2014 press conference about the disappearances by waiving away questions and saying, “Enough, I’m tired.” His words, viewed as a cold dismissal, became a viral hashtag and sealed his legacy as the face of the government cover-up.

But that also makes him a convenient scapegoat, raising questions about who else in the upper echelons of Pena Nieto’s government was involved. For the past year, the Mexican government has been trying to get Israel, with which it lacks an extradition treaty, to hand over Tomas Zeron, the former head of Mexico’s criminal investigation agency, or AIC, which was dissolved in 2018. Zeron is suspected of torture in connection with Ayotzinapa, not to mention a whole host of other offenses, and it’s thought that he could reveal incriminating information tying former Cabinet members and even Pena Nieto himself to the case.

Moreover, the charges against Murillo Karam might not even stick. After all, Mexicans are used to watching the powerful wiggle their way out of serving time, and few high-level officials have ever been convicted of human rights abuses. The country’s frail justice system, marred by corruption and weak capacity, places it 60th out of the 69 countries listed in the most recent Global Impunity Index. In fact, a mere 1 percent of crimes committed in Mexico ever get resolved. It would take an airtight case to convict the one-time attorney general, and already there have been missteps; authorities first arrested his brother by mistake, for instance.

Second, there is the issue of how much information the Mexican government is willing to release about the military’s role in Ayotzinapa. Even if Murillo Karam is a big-name arrest, his status as a power player in the preceding opposition administration means it creates little political risk for AMLO’s current one. But what about former Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos, who was investigated for narcotrafficking ties in the United States, and then released under the current Mexican government’s watch? Independent investigators and Ayotzinapa victims’ family members have accused the powerful retired general of blocking inquiries into the case.

Such questions arise at a time when Mexico’s armed forces are at their most powerful in recent history. While AMLO pledged to get to the bottom of Ayotzinapa, he also made promises on the campaign trail to return troops back to the barracks and replace what is now a 15-year-old offensive against organized crime with a security strategy emphasizing “hugs, not bullets.” Instead, he created a 110,000-strong National Guard to replace the federal police, a move experts say has weakened the intelligence-gathering capacity that is necessary to fight crime. The murder toll during AMLO’s time in office is on track to exceed the already violent terms of his two predecessors.

Moreover, the president is taking steps to transfer the National Guard—which is already mostly made up of soldiers—from civilian to military control and keep the armed forces in charge of public security beyond 2024, when he is set to leave office. At the beginning of September, he introduced a reform to Congress to do just that. It quickly won approval in in both houses, where his coalition holds the largest number of seats.

AMLO’s government has already extended the armed forces’ mandate in other ways, too, giving it control over everything from ports to customs. In a bid to control costs on his government’s landmark infrastructure projects, he is turning to the military to build a new airport outside the capital, a train project questioned by environmentalists running through the Yucatan Peninsula and an oil refinery in the president’s home state of Tabasco.

It’s unclear how the military’s rising prominence could hamper efforts to hold some of its members accountable for Ayotzinapa, and there are signs the government is treading with caution. The commission’s report itself includes redacted materials that appear to conceal aspects of the military’s role. Though 20 of the arrest warrants issued were for soldiers, the commission’s top official, Encinas, waited more than a week after the report’s release to reveal a stunning piece of information: For at least four days after the 43 students disappeared, six were kept alive in a warehouse before being turned over to a military officer, allegedly Col. Jose Rodriguez Perez, who ordered them killed.

The third issue that hampers the case’s closure is the one that strikes deepest. The victims’ loved ones are still waiting for answers about where to find the bodies of their sons, brothers, cousins and friends. For years, family members have marched on the 26th day of each month with banners reading: “They were taken alive, we want them back alive.” When the truth commission’s report was released, Encinas said, “There is no indication that the students are still alive.” But without bodies to lay to rest, and with bone fragments of only three of the students having been identified thus far, the families still have doubts about what happened to their loved ones that night.

The pain caused by living in such a state of purgatory is shared by far too many Mexicans. In May, the country arrived at a grim toll: 100,000 people have disappeared in Mexico, the vast majority of them over the past 15 years during a militarized approach to policing that shows no signs of ending. In the end, the Ayotzinapa commission’s report may be a major step in the eight-year-old case, but it also exposes why the road to the truth is a long one.